1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a network switching device and a control method of the network switching device.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventionally used network switching device (for example, a layer 2 switch) relays data, based on a destination address such as MAC address related to the data. The network switching device has multiple switching processors, which individually store address tables and specify a output port of the data based on the destination address. The network switching device requires a management system for standardizing the contents of the respective address tables.
In a prior art network switching device adopting a proposed technique, each of multiple switching processors manages a local MAC address table, while a management CPU manages a master MAC address table. The master MAC address table has the integrated storage representing the contents of the multiple local MAC address tables. Each of the multiple switching processors refers to the master MAC address table when a destination MAC address of received data is not present in its local MAC address table. Every time its local MAC address table is updated, each switching processor notifies the management CPU of update information for registration of the update information into the master MAC address table.
In this prior art network switching device, the management CPU manages the master MAC address table and accordingly requires a memory capacity for storage of the master MAC address table. Each of the multiple switching processors refers to the master MAC address table when the destination MAC address of the received data is not present in its local MAC address table. This may undesirably increase the processing load in each of the multiple switching processors.